Supporting Children with Challenging Behaviors: Relationships Are Key

The purpose of this guide is to provide early childhood teaching teams and their supervisors with a process for reflecting on their own practice, assessing difficult situations, and designing interventions through joint problem solving. The emphasis of the guide is not on specific techniques. Rather, the focus is on helping adults understand their own behavior, their assumptions, and their relationships with children with challenging behaviors.

"The guide is strong and cohesive, respectful of staff members, and realistic about the daily issues they face. A welcome relief from the prescriptive deficit-oriented approaches. It's outstanding!"

"As both a clinically-trained social worker and a parent of a child with ADD, I give this guide an A+. The guide puts responsibility for change squarely where it belongs; that is, we cannot expect children to change their troubled and troubling behaviors, unless we change our ways of seeing and relating to them. We cannot expect children to discover and build on their strengths, unless we bring a strengths perspective to them and their families. Without a doubt, this guide succeeds in showing the early childhood community how to operationalize both premises."

The Guide At A Glance

This guide includes the following sections:

Module 1: Laying the Groundwork helps participants identify ways in which their own perceptions and experiences influence how they interact with children with challenging behaviors.
Module 2: Practically Speaking helps participants develop a system for collecting data, and then use it to develop strategies that capitalize on children's strengths and needs.
Module 3: Building a Supportive Environment helps participants identify when and how to seek appropriate supports within the program and the community to fully integrate children with challenging behaviors.
Continuing Professional Development offers strategies that supervisors can use to help staff apply new skills and extend their learning.
Resources lists print and audiovisual materials and other resources that staff can use to learn more about the key issues presented in the guide.

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*Photograph by Marlene Nelson, courtesy of Education Development Center, Inc.